The Tick Almanac
Michigan Build My Kit
About

A field guide to ticks — built for the U.S. reader who wants an answer, not a panic.

The Tick Almanac is a regional, source-cited reference for tick identification, prevention, removal, pet protection, and yard treatment. Every disease claim is reviewed by a medical doctor. Every pet-prevention claim is reviewed by a veterinarian. Every regional claim is reviewed by a state authority's published data. If a page can't carry that signoff, it stays in awaiting-reviewer status with a visible noindex badge.

What we publish

  • State guides (4 live, more shipping monthly). Each built on a §13a State Data Row sourced from the state health department, state conservation/agriculture, and the relevant university extension. The four U.S. regions with the heaviest tick burden ship first.
  • Cluster articles. Five funnels: Identify, Remove, Prevent, Pets, Yard. Reviewer-routed by topic: medical for removal & symptoms, veterinary for pets, entomology for species.
  • Build My Tick Kit quiz. Six questions, two minutes. Outputs a kit shaped to your state, household, exposure, and protection level — with Tier 0 safety overrides for cat households and children.
  • Tick Watch. Daily-refreshed feed of recalls, advisories, label changes, research, news, and community discussion. Auto-pulled from CDC, FDA, EPA, state health departments, major news outlets, YouTube, and Reddit — quality-filtered, deduped, and capped.

Who runs it

The Tick Almanac is an independent publication, edited under the Tick Almanac Editorial pen name during the pre-launch reviewer recruitment phase. We publish under a pen name only because we believe in named reviewers more than named authors: the medical, veterinary, and entomology reviewers carry the credibility for the claims they sign off on, and their names appear visibly on every reviewed page with their credentials, bio, and "last reviewed" date.

When reviewer signoff lands for each cluster, the corresponding author byline replaces the editorial pen name on the affected pages. This is staged honestly — we won't list a reviewer's name on a page they haven't actually reviewed, and we won't pretend a page is medically reviewed when it isn't.

Editorial standard

  1. Named human author on every byline page. No anonymous posts, no AI "author" credits, no aggregated-content farms.
  2. Medical or vet reviewer for every disease- and treatment-adjacent page. Reviewer name, credentials, "last reviewed" date visible above the fold. Locked-preview badge until signoff.
  3. Primary sources cited inline. CDC, FDA, EPA, NIH, AAD, AVMA, state health departments, university extension, peer-reviewed journals. The complete list is at /sources.
  4. FTC disclosure first. Affiliate links never appear inside symptom, removal, dosing, contraindication, or veterinary-warning copy. A build-time check blocks deploys that violate this. Full policy: /affiliate-disclosure.
  5. Region-honest reporting. State guides are sourced from the actual state authority, not from one of fifty templated "best tick repellent in [state]" SEO pages. If we don't have a state's data yet, we show the regional baseline and say so explicitly.

How we're funded

Two revenue lines, both transparent:

  • Affiliate commissions — when you buy a tick removal tool, repellent, or prevention product through our links, we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We disclose this on every page that contains an affiliate link. Read the disclosure.
  • No sponsored content. No paid placement. Manufacturers cannot pay to appear in our kit recommendations or product picks. Our recommendations come from label review, peer-reviewed efficacy studies, FDA/EPA registration status, and reviewer signoff — never from advertiser relationships.

You'll never see programmatic display ads on the site. We'd rather earn $0 from a reader than serve them a banner ad for a competing product on a page that's trying to help them remove a tick safely.

Disclaimers, in plain English

  • This site does not diagnose illness. If you have symptoms after a tick bite — fever, rash, severe headache, neurologic changes, flu-like fatigue — contact a clinician. Use this site to orient, not to self-diagnose. Full: /medical-disclaimer.
  • This site does not replace your veterinarian. Pet-specific dosing, adverse-event triage, and prescription decisions belong with your DVM. Full: /veterinary-disclaimer.
  • Our maps and seasonal claims are sourced, not predicted. When we say "blacklegged nymph peak is May–July in Minnesota," it's because MDH and UMN Extension say so — not because we modeled it.

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